One of the most treasured anecdotes of Bloomsbury insists that the modern world began on a spring evening in 1908, in a flat on Gordon Square. It was a Something About Mary moment, in which Lytton Strachey, a decade before his hatchet job on the Victorians, walked into the drawing room and pointed at a stain on Vanessa Bell’s dress. “Semen?” he inquired. “With that one word,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “all barriers of reticence and reserve went down … It was, I think, a great advance in civilisation.” Her anecdote remained unpublished until 1976.
Ben Wilson’s Heyday marks the coming of modernity with another substance. Gutta-percha – the resinous effluvium of the palaquium tree, and a largely forgotten wonder of the 19th-century world. Harvested in Sarawak, shipped from Singapore, processed at a canalside tech startup in Islington and tested by 800 London schoolboys, whose gutta-percha shoes remained untorn after hours of horsing about “on the rough gravelled ground”. Gutta-percha filled hollow molars, sheathed the skulls of Cornish tin miners, gave shape and form to golf balls, ear trumpets, inkstands and horsewhips. Gutta-percha “noiseless curtain rings” provided relief to Victorians plagued by the terrible problem of noisy curtains. Most importantly, though, this versatile Malaysian vegetable polymer was used to insulate a cable unspooled between Dover and Calais in September 1851. And this, for Wilson, is what makes it a marker of modernity. When the first pulse surged through that cable, the era of near-instantaneous electronic transcontinental communication began. Wilson calls it an annus mirabilis, but the novelist Thomas Hardy coined a better phrase: 1851, he wrote, was “an extraordinary chronological frontier”.
Heyday is a breathless tour of that territory, and the decade-long economic and technological boom that shaped the lie of its land. The action takes place in those parts of the globe that characters depart to, or return from, at key moments in three-volume Victorian novels. Wilson has visited many of these places in the pursuit of his research. We go to gold-rush Australia, where the possibility of sudden enrichment led police officers to desert their posts and asylum directors to leave inmates in charge. We hang out with the boosters, the timeshare salesmen of the colonial world, who told potential emigrants that the comfortless climate of Minnesota duplicated that of ancient Rome, and would therefore foster “the highest degree of physical and mental power”. Then we’re on the banks of the Ganges, where Lieutenant Pat Stewart is avenging the atrocities of the Indian rebellion by blowing up ancient Hindu temples with the grim zeal of a Taliban commander. (“The East,” Lord Elgin wrote, “is strewed all over with the records of our violence and fraud, and disregard of right.”) Somewhere towards the end, we materialise everywhere in the world simultaneously, wincing with the telegraph operators who found their wires discharging blue sparks and textual gibberish during the great geomagnetic storm of 1859. (“Fantastical and unreadable messages came through the instruments,” said one report, as the sky above crackled with light like “the reflection of an immense bushfire”.)
Wilson’s book is a persuasive example of a newish turn in writing about the 19th century: the expansive survey of a globalised Victorian world, powered by a new battery of online resources. It’s the scholarship of an era in which you can tap “gutta-percha” into search engines that allow access to the freshly digitised expanses of periodicals from the time. Put the term into the British Library’s Newspaper Archive, and the hits give you a decade-by-decade account of the rise and fall of a forgotten industry. It’s an exhilarating time to be a Victorianist.
And if the reach and speed of the endeavour feels appropriately 19th-century, so does the material emphasis that this brings to the work. Heyday is not a book about ideas; it’s a book about stuff. Gold, silver, iron, steel, wire, glass, latex, and, more unusually, human hair. We might not feel surprised when asked to read our past in the fires of industrial furnaces or the panels of the Crystal Palace, but few works of British economic history have been quite so strongly pogonological. Wilson reveals that the new caste of wealthy Melbourne gold-diggers who emerged in the 1850s were known as the “hairystocracy”, and beneath their bristles he discerns the face of a new, distinctly Australian form of libertarianism. Understanding the transformation of Britain from a nation of smooth-faced men to one engaged in the cultivation of elaborate sideburns is, he suggests, a way of tracking the creeping militarisation of British society.
It’s an approach that works with a decade such as the 1850s, in which the machinery of empire had been constructed, but was yet to resonate fully with the imperial ideology that would later fill Britain with union jack bunting, souvenir saucers and pink-tinged maps. It asks us to imagine the world through the eyes of a people whose sense of an imperial project is perhaps closer to our own understanding that there are people drinking Scotch whisky in Japan, and others elsewhere being killed with technology built by BAE Systems, but that ultimately, it’s somebody else’s party, and nothing to do with us.
Wilson is overfond of certain expressions. I lost count of the number of times the phrase “little wonder” crops up in the text, sometimes more than once in a paragraph. His editors ought to have fixed this – partly because of its infelicity, but mainly because Heyday is a book that contains plenty of wonders. It scopes the globe, looking for the telltale marks of modernity. It finds them in the discharge of gunpowder, the slather of industrial grease, the shiver of the telegraph wire. And once it has pointed them out, it feels no pressure to moralise – still less to identify a great advance in civilisation, which, a century or so later, might seem as quaint as an ear trumpet made of gutta-percha.
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